Voicing the “Communal Heart”

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Notes

notes

1 The embedded reference is to Wordsworth's Preface to the 1801 edition of his and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (see Wordsworth, Selected Poems 448).

2 A pastiche is, of course, different from a fragment; it is a plurality of fragments. However, already in Jena we see an interest in bringing textual fragments together to form a plurality of ideas.

3 Acker's reference here to imagination is in strong contrast to her earlier claim that the “word imagination is a bit of a bugaboo.”

4 The other key work of fiction in which Acker reflects on plagiarism is, of course, her Don Quixote. While this text has received extensive critical attention, “Dead Doll Prophecy,” which makes a more overtly romantic critique of property structures than Don Quixote, has generated little critical (and certainly no sustained) discussion.

5 In an interview with Larry McCaffrey, Acker comments on her contact with the Black Mountain poets when she was a teenager (McCaffrey 27). Elsewhere, with reference to her apprenticeship with US poet and critic David Antin, she writes: “The act of writing for me was the most pleasurable thing in the world. Just writing. Why did I have to find my own voice and where was it? I hated my fathers” (“Few Notes” 9).

6 In her contribution to a book in which several contemporary writers comment on their work practices (each presenting a draft section from one of their publications), Acker speaks in a matter-of-fact manner about her approach to writing: “I now make five or six drafts for each chapter of my books. The last two drafts are typed, then read aloud, in that order, for purposes of editing. The earlier drafts consist of layers of material – other texts, dreams, bits of autobiography, thinking notes – which I delete rearrange add to and damage in each successive draft” (ctd in Junker 7).